From the "What's your favorite coffee" thread, a guest wrote in telling her favorite tea. I thought I would start a thread on that topic beginning with a quote of her post:

magenta wrote:

I like tea more then coffee. My fave is Earl Gray (natural). I also like tea with different herbs.

I saw that the guest, "Magenta" likes NATURAL Earl Gray Tea. Until the early or middle 1970's, Twinings Earl Gray Tea was what I would call "Natural" and I drank that a lot of it. After that time, they started adding Bergamot oil (a type of orange) to their Earl Gray Tea, and I haven't liked it since. I miss the old Natural Earl Gray.

So, for now, my favorite teas (hot or iced) are black teas, mostly Twinings Irish Breakfast, English Breakfast and Darjeeling. I like my hot teas with a tiny amount of cream and sugar. I take my iced teas "straight." When I was a teenager and wanted to be a little obnoxious, I would brew a pot of Lapsang Souchong. (If you've had that one, you know what I mean!)

Does anybody know which tea company makes Earl Gray tea that does NOT have Bergamot oil???

^^^^ I'm positive (99.999%) that there wasn't any Bergamot in the old Earl Gray Twinings made in the early 1970's. I had a display in the pantry of about ten different tins of loose Twinings teas when I was in high school. Later, when I went to college, I saw the tin had changed and it then said "with Bergamot oil". When I saw that, I had to look up what a bergamot was when I got home. At first I thought it might have been just a reprinting of the label on the can, except the tea tasted completely different and I only had a couple of cups of that tea. I never finished the can and I had previously liked Earl Gray a lot.

I'm super fond of mint tea, left to brew forever either unsweetened or with a touch of honey. Either that or Basil, crushed up with some Meyer lemon in hot water. Not sure if either qualify as proper tea...

^^^^ I'm positive (99.999%) that there wasn't any Bergamot in the old Earl Gray Twinings made in the early 1970's. I had a display in the pantry of about ten different tins of loose Twinings teas when I was in high school. Later, when I went to college, I saw the tin had changed and it then said "with Bergamot oil". When I saw that, I had to look up what a bergamot was when I got home. At first I thought it might have been just a reprinting of the label on the can, except the tea tasted completely different and I only had a couple of cups of that tea. I never finished the can and I had previously liked Earl Gray a lot.

I think the confusion is the fact that some Earl Grey Teas have lavender in them, like this Earl Grey Tea here. I believe that Twingings used to advertise the lavender part of their tea decades ago because they felt that Bergamot sounded too foreign for their customers.

Make no doubt about it, earl Grey has to have Bergamot included by definition. An Earl Grey without Bergamot would be like cooking a Coq Au Vin without red wine.

I have a very varied taste when it comes to Teas, and tend to drink whatevever I fancy from the cupboard at the time; Brooke Bond PG tips is almost a staple,,but my cupboard also contains the following; Asda roll back round Tea bags, Twinnings Chia Tea, Lidl Fairglobe fairtrade Tea, Red Bush Tea and many vararity of the berry and natural leaf Teas.